The brutality of utopias

The apparently fluid but strident worlds by Dionisio González.

"Like the Marxists and the liberals, Le Corbusier imagined humans working in square, utilitarian office blocks with no decoration whatsoever, and their residential buildings would be almost exactly the same... In between these structures for working and living, free space was reserved for wild nature. Humans were crammed into circumscribed modular dwellings, set in the midst of a nature that they were not allowed to alter on any account. It is dreadfully primitive when you come to think of it, a terrible regression from any rural landscape – a subtle, complex, evolutionary mixture of lawns, fields, woods and towns. It is the vision of a brutal spirit." (Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, 2010). Utopia demands a denial of time. A realised utopia is definitive and concluded. It cannot evolve, for that would imply an error or instability in the originally conceived utopia. This is what seems to underlie the brutality that Michel Houellebecq ascribes to Le Corbusier's vision in his latest novel: utopia's inherent lack of evolutionary scope (for nature, man and architecture itself), and the exclusion of continuity from its language. The same flaw is also shared by 3D projects for the most recent signature buildings, thus disclosing their utopian aspiration: whiter than white, rendered surfaces; empty and immaculate horizons all around, never to be populated; proportionate, identical trees set in rows; scattered knots of people inside them gazing into each other's eyes or holding hands, with children destined never to grow, who have no shadow. This non-utopia represents the epicentre of Dionisio González's work.

Roberto Marinho I, colour photo, diasec, 2004.

At first sight, the photographic cycles created by González since 2004 look as terse, bright and utopian as the finest renderings. People, formal inaccuracies and dissonances are banished from the composition of his large-scale prints, dominated entirely by an almost abstract rigour, with symmetrical and colourful facades taken at right angles. In all this formal refinement, a feature of González's photos is lost to the eye, at least at first sight. And it takes a particular insistence on details to reveal it: his photos portray only slums. To be precise, these are modified slums. Upon closer inspection, all González's compositions reveal computer processing and interpolations. In between a metal wall and a container, a shack or a rotting wood partition, González inserts architectural modules of a recognisably contemporary style, in glass and metal, geometrical and essential. Once noticed, their incongruity is evident, for reasons of structural feasibility and, more simply, economic plausibility. Yet initially they seem to blend perfectly with the shanty towns in which they stand. They even look like spontaneous outgrowths, natural elements or organs. In another cycle, González applies the same imaginative strategy to a floating village in Halong Bay, by integrating it with futuristic architectures that simultaneously take up the traditional forms of dwelling and the island profiles that delimit the harbour. Here, too, at first sight, his alterations are invisible. Even when you notice them, it is hard to tell exactly what is false or wrong about them.

Buraco Quente, colour photo, diasec, 150 x 280 cm, 2004. This photo is part of a cycle of works on the Brazilian favelas, the image of which stands as the symbol of a popular culture that nobody bothers
to safeguard. Among the elements of the Brazilian shanty-towns, González has inserted geometric and essential architectural modules made of glass and metal in a contemporary style. — Buraco Quente, colour photo, diasec, 150 x 280 cm, 2004. This photo is part of a cycle of works on the Brazilian favelas, the image of which stands as the symbol of a popular culture that nobody bothers to safeguard. Among the elements of the Brazilian shanty-towns, González has inserted geometric and essential architectural modules made of glass and metal in a contemporary style.

So what is wrong about them? Organic insertions and respect for the pre-existent are a banner of much contemporary architecture. But naturally, as González ironically points out, this respect and organic quality are in many cases intrinsically impossible. Such impossibility recalls the brutality and discontinuity of utopias, thus revealing the utopian aspirations hidden in the most ordinary of renderings for an acclaimed apartment tower. The structures envisaged by González are, in this sense, as respectful as could be imagined, in their use of pre-existing forms of modules, and in their philosophy of aesthetic modesty and integration. And yet, aside from first impressions, they are and remain alien to that context. González seems to suggest that, as integrated as it may be into the human body, a bionic arm will never be an evolution of it: it will always be a more or less rejected transplant. In this sense, the contextual homogeneity displayed by González's architectural interpolations assumes what is at least an ambiguous light. For while it may still be an extraneous body, its likeness to the ordinary environment may appear to be a sort of disguise or parasitic adaptation. Here again, the plain juxtaposition orchestrated by González seems a disenchanted and caustic comment on how architecture can dialogue with its surroundings. González appears to say that these forms are similar and continuous. But they are not. The political quality of this denial shines through in his choice of stridently, though apparently fluidly, associating incompatible economic and social realities. One is reminded of luxury high-rises in ex-working-class areas, of glass cathedrals dumped without warning in the middle of European city suburbs. Those, under the corrugated metal, are Dionisio Gonzales's shanty-towns; and that is the stridency.

In between a metal wall and a container, a shack or a rotting wood partition, González inserts architectural modules of a recognisably contemporary style, in glass and metal, geometrical and essential.

Project in Halong Bay, Vietnam (colour photos, diasec), a collection of floating villages stretching 120 km along the coast: Halong VII, 150 x 500 cm, 2009. © 2010 Novalis Contemporary Art, Torino.

Interruptions do not heal with time. Organic evolution does not gloss over their irregularities, nor incorporate their surfaces. An attached cybernetic limb will never heal; platelets do not coagulate the titanium alloy. Likewise, no landscape transformation can mitigate the contrast between the structures pictured by González and the real shanty-towns into which they are inserted. There they will remain, incongruous, geometric, uninhabited and ethereal, until cracks and neglect defeat their brightness. This, perhaps above all else, is what unites modernist utopias: their being doomed to failure. Vincenzo Latronico

Project in Halong Bay, Vietnam (colour photos, diasec), a collection of floating villages stretching 120 km along the coast: Halong VI, 150 x 450 cm, 2008 (below); detail of Halong XI, 100 x 350 cm, 2010 (following pages). © 2010 Novalis Contemporary Art, Turin.

Born in 1965 in Gijón, Spain, Dionisio González lives in Seville and is a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Seville. Through videos and photos taken by him and subsequently manipulated on computer, he presents images of spontaneous settlements modified with inserted fragments of contemporary architecture that blend into the context. His interest focuses on the relationship between social groups and the strategies through which the weakest communities attempt to protect their culture and economy.

Nova Heliópolis IV, colour photo, diasec, 180 x 405.5 cm, 2006. This series is the result of years of work travelling throughout the internal world of the shanty-towns of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
After an exacting study of these massive irregular settlements, the artist proposes a radical restructuring of the constructability, improving precarious conditions of habitability. — Nova Heliópolis IV, colour photo, diasec, 180 x 405.5 cm, 2006. This series is the result of years of work travelling throughout the internal world of the shanty-towns of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. After an exacting study of these massive irregular settlements, the artist proposes a radical restructuring of the constructability, improving precarious conditions of habitability.

The brutality of utopias

The apparently fluid but strident worlds by Dionisio González.

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